Please welcome Susannah Sandlin
to the Mystique
with her novel Chenoire!
Chenoire
Susannah
Sandlin
Genre:
Paranormal Romance
Heat level:
mild
Publisher:
StoryFront
Date of
Publication: December 18, 2013
ASIN:
B00GMTVZYI
Number of
pages: 50
Word Count:
approx. 15,000
Book
Description:
When Faith
Garrity’s twin sister died, she lost a part of herself. Unable to move past the
pain, the once-driven ornithologist is at risk of losing her career as well. To
save her job, she heads to the oil-ravaged wetlands of Louisiana. There, in the
bayou community of Chenoire, she encounters the handsome but guarded Zackary
Préjean, still suffering from a great loss of his own.
She’s drawn
to Zack, but soon finds that the Préjean family isn’t what it seems… They have
dangerous secrets—and deadly enemies. Caught up in a feud that threatens the
area’s uneasy truce, Faith and Zack must learn to trust each other. Survival
will require enormous sacrifice, but it just might also give them both a way to
move on.
Short
Excerpt:
Zack Préjean
wiped the blood from his skinning knife onto the faded blue bottom of the apron
he wore, scanning the bayou that backed up to his papa’s back porch. Something
had drawn his attention, but he couldn’t figure out what.
He’d been
working on the small gator for half an hour, figuring to take off enough fresh
meat for dinner and prep the rest to deal with later—it was too small for the
skin to be worth much. The calls and caws of the birds and cackles of swamp
hens soothed him, and God knew he needed soothing. Spending the whole month of
gator season at Chenoire wasn’t what he wanted to be doing. But Papa had asked
him outright for help, and he had to honor that.
Finally, he figured out what had
caught his attention; the bayou was too quiet. He wedged the knife through his
apron ties, covered the gator with a towel, and closed his eyes to focus on
what he could hear. Footsteps coming from the path leading down to the
house—heavy ones, stirring up a whiff of anger.
Zack tripped on his way through the
kitchen, catching his toe on the edge of a chair because he’d been staring out
the front window instead of watching where he was going. All this family time
must be getting to him, because for a moment he swore he’d seen not a man on
the path that angled toward the small circle of houses where the Préjeans had
lived for generations.
No, he
thought he’d seen an angel.
Except angels didn’t stomp their
feet, curse like sailors, and swat at bugs, which is what this one appeared to
be doing. What the hell was a woman doing on foot way out here at dusk?
Crossing his arms over his chest,
Zack leaned against the frame of the front door, silent and still, waiting to
see what trouble she brought. She looked like a city woman, and city women
always brought trouble.
He couldn’t keep the grin off his
face. Whatever else she was, his citified swamp angel was pissed off and dirty
as sin. Bits of mud flaked off what might be a long, lean pair of legs
underneath the grime that covered her from her shoes to the bottom of her khaki
shorts—or maybe they were mud-covered black shorts. Hard to tell. Her hands
flew around her head, batting at what Zack knew were probably the armies of
tiny no-see-ums that swarmed near the small stand of trees this time of day.
Occasionally, she swatted at her own head, giving her short blond hair a
disheveled look he’d mistaken for a halo.
“Damned gnats. I’m gonna—” The angel
finally spotted him and stopped in her tracks, dark-blue eyes growing wider as
her gaze dropped from Zack’s face to the vicinity of the knife.
He cleared
his throat and stifled the laugh that threatened to escape. “You lost, Angel?”
About the Author:
Susannah
Sandlin writes paranormal romance and romantic thrillers from Auburn, Alabama,
on top of a career in educational publishing that has thus far spanned five
states and six universities—including both Alabama and Auburn, which makes her
bilingual. She grew up in Winfield, Alabama, but was also a longtime resident
of New Orleans, so she has a highly refined sense of the absurd and an
ingrained love of SEC football, cheap Mardi Gras trinkets, and fried gator on a
stick. She’s the author of the award-winning Penton Legacy paranormal romance
series, a spinoff novel, Storm Force, and a new romantic thriller beginning
this month with Lovely, Dark, and Deep. Writing as Suzanne Johnson, she also is
the author of the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series.
Website: http://www.susannahsandlin.com
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment